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“You don't have to call him tonight.” I eased up beside him.

“Tanvi is right. If Fabian truly cares about me, he'll back off.” He picked up the phone, dialed, pressed the speaker button, and set the device back on the table.

Fabian answered on the second ring. “I wondered how long you would wait. How are you feeling? I imagine yesterday was hard on you. I'm sorry. I felt it was necessary to spur you into action.”

“You wasted your time.” Tristan's tone was smug. “You are offering a solution to a problem that no longer exists.”

“Explain.”

“During the enormous Pull you forced on me, the burden became more than I could endure.” Tristan took my hand and kissed it. “Destiny took the pain from me. More than that, she met Heartbreak with love. She balanced it. The Pull broke, and for the first time in seventeen hundred years, the Curse fell silent because it was content. I am already free. So you don't need to worry about the ritual.”

For three long seconds, we stood there staring at the phone, waiting.

When Fabian spoke again, a soft, breathless laugh preceded his words. “My God. It worked even better than I predicted.”

Tristan’s jaw tightened. “Did you hear a word I said?”

“I heard every syllable.” Fabian's voice rose in triumph. “And it proves my theory beyond a shadow of a doubt. Miss Takeda possesses an extraordinary capacity to carry emotional trauma. She is capable of taking the raw essence of Heartbreak into herself without being consumed. She is the vessel I have spent centuries searching for. She's the vessel Heartbreak has been searching for. I will only have to set it free of you, and it will go to her unbidden.”

“No,” Tristan snarled. “She is not meant to keep it. She transformed it.”

“For an hour? A day?” Fabian’s tone softened. “Tristan, my dear friend, listen to yourself. You are speaking like a mortal drunk on romance. Heartbreak is an immortal force born of human misery. You cannot tame a storm by smiling at it. What she gave you was an echo of relief—a fleeting anesthetic. When that warmth fades, and it will fade, Heartbreak will return with a ferocity you have never before experienced. It will be starved for what it tasted, and to get at her, it will tear you apart from the inside until you break.”

Tristan’s hand clenched around mine.

“When that happens,” Fabian continued relentlessly, “you will destroy her. Your agony will crush the woman you love because neither you nor the Curse will be able to stop. You will beg for an ending, Tristan. You will give the Curse to her simply to make the bleeding stop. That is why we must proceed. It is far more urgent now than it was yesterday. The transfer must be managed under controlled conditions, before your lack of discipline gets her killed.”

“Listen to me very carefully.” Tristan's voice vibrated with a lethal, ancient fury that made the room feel smaller. “If either you or Osric come near Destiny, if you take one step toward this estate, I will not treat you as an old friend who lost his way. I will tear you apart until there is nothing left to bury. Stay away from her.”

“You have always fought the medicine, Tristan,” Fabian said. “I will save you from yourself.”

Tristan slammed the phone shut, cutting the connection.

The silence was suffocating. Tristan set the phone down and remained hunched over the table, his breath coming in ragged bursts, his chest rising and falling as if he had just run miles. But he still clutched my hand.

I moved in front of him. “He's beyond reasoning with, but it will be okay. We'll figure it out.”

Tristan continued to stare at the phone. “He is mad, but in his madness, there is genius that he'll use against me.”

“We just have to stay here. If we have to wait months, so be it. We're not in the middle ages. We can withstand a siege.”

Tristan pulled me into a hug. “I love you.” He paused. “But Fabian has waited centuries. He's not going away.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

After the phone call, Tristan urged action, and the Conclave decided to go on the offensive. We gathered in the meeting room on the second floor to work. Seraphel set up a command center at a desk in the far corner where he monitored teams of the Conclave's investigators. On the main table, maps of the mid-Atlantic corridor lay pinned under bronze paperweights, marked with red ink where Osric and Fabian had owned or currently owned property.

Tanvi sat at the center of the table, her braid coming loose at the nape of her neck as she audited bank records. Near the tall arched windows, Cassian sat with a laptop, looking through surveillance photos sent over by Seraphel's teams. Finding someone in real life wasn't as simple as it was in the movies. Even with the investigators hacking into cameras in transit networks, high traffic areas, and smart city infrastructure to use facial recognition software, it wasn't a matter of waiting for the computer to find them. Facial recognition software isn't exact. It brings up hundreds of possibilities to be reviewed. The teams did an initial pass to narrow down the images and then sent the rest to Cassian.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Conclave researched recent artifact sales, alias, associates (including Mirana, and locations on the maps. Trays of half-eaten food littered the room. Bart had disappeared after a few hours, pleading a headache, and I didn't blame him. This non-stop pace was getting to me too. As much as I appreciated their eagerness to help, I didn't think this urgency was warranted. Tristan and I weren't in imminent danger.

I stepped out into the hallway and stretched my back. My shoulders ached from hours of sitting over reports and my vision was getting wonky. The Conclave had added security inside the main house, and every time the floorboards creaked beneath a guard's boots, my pulse jumped. Even when it was silent, my muscles tensed, bracing for whatever was coming next. In short, their anxiety was boosting mine, and I needed a break.

At the end of the gallery, Bart sat on the bottom step of the back staircase. He held a thick ceramic mug between his palms and met my gaze with a hollow one. His skin had a sickly pallor, making me wonder how many centuries he'd spent waking up with a dry mouth, a headache, and a sour stomach. For the first time since I'd met him, he didn't offer a dry remark or a joke.

“You look exhausted, Bart.” I stepped over to him.

“Occupational hazard.” He set the mug on the step. No steam rose from the dark liquid inside. “Walk with me for a minute, Destiny. Away from the war room.”